»I'm in love with all the places I will never see, the people who never give up on me, the books I may never read and the songs which express my feelings better than any words ever could. I will always go to bed too late and fall down the rabbit hole and maybe that's exactly how it should be.«

I don’t remember exactly why this book ended up on my tbr list but I am glad it did and that I made myself read it. I LOVE this book and its characters, the world, the writing – how its linked and believable and still fantastical things are possible to happen. At the beginning you need some time to warm up to the novel and the way it is told through two different perspectives. Repetitions are used a lot throughout and the story doesn’t offer answers for every question it asks: there is a lot of room left for interpretation as a reader. I understand why 1Q84 and maybe Murakami in general may not be for everyone… but I am glad I discovered him and that I can get lost in his works from now on!

This may be the most important proposition revealed by history: “At the time, no one
knew what was coming.”

Don’t let appearances fool you. There’s always only one reality.

“Did you ever experience bullying when you were a child?”
Tengo thought back to his childhood. “I don’t think so,” he answered. “Or maybe I just
never noticed.”
“If you never noticed, it never happened. I mean, the whole point of bullying is to make the person notice it’s being done to him or her. You can’t have bullying without the victim noticing.”

„Finally,” his girlfriend said, “everybody feels safe belonging not to the excluded minority but to the excluding majority. You think, Oh, I’m glad that’s not me. It’s basically the same in all periods in all societies. If you belong to the majority, you can avoid thinking about lots of troubling things.”

Father and son: each was locked in a deep, dark embrace with his secrets.

Am I just making up a self-serving hypothesis as a form of self-defense? Maybe it’s just that I’ve gone crazy. I see my own mind as perfectly normal, as free of distortion. But don’t all mental patients insist that they are perfectly fine and it’s the world around them that is crazy? Aren’t I just proposing the wild hypothesis of parallel worlds as a way to justify my own madness?

Of course, reading novels was just another form of escape. As soon as he closed their pages he had to come back to the real world.

What did it mean for a person to be free? she would often ask herself. Even if you managed to escape from one cage, weren’t you just in another, larger one?

“It’s the same with menus and men and just about anything else: we think we’re
choosing things for ourselves, but in fact we may not be choosing anything. It could be that everything’s decided in advance and we pretend we’re making choices. Free will may be an illusion. I often think that.”

„To think that people four
hundred years ago were listening to the same music we’re hearing
now! Doesn’t it make you feel strange?”

“I like history books too. They teach us that we’re basically the same, whether now or in the old days. There may be a few differences in clothing and lifestyle,
but there’s not that much difference in what we think and do.”

“Even if we could turn back, we’d probably never end up where we started,” the
Professor said.“

But decent motives don’t always produce decent results. And the body is not the only target of rape. Violence does not always take visible form, and not all wounds gush blood.

“You can’t choose how you’re born, but you can choose how you die.”

„But what I’m most hoping for in this case is that the gun will come back to me unused. Then no one gets in trouble, no one dies, no one gets hurt, and no one
goes to prison.”
Aomame nodded. “Meaning, you want me to violate Chekhov’s rule.”
“Exactly. Chekhov was a great writer, but not all novels have to follow his rules. Not all guns in stories have to be fired,” Tamaru said.”

…and promises unmade are never broken.

If you can’t understand it without an explanation, you can’t understand it with an
explanation.

Let the world move along as it pleased. If it had any business with him, it would be sure to tell him.

“You’ve been reading too much science fiction. No, this is no parallel world. You don’t
have 1984 over there and 1Q84 branching off over here and the two worlds running along parallel tracks. The year 1984 no longer exists anywhere. For you and for me, the only time that exists anymore is this year of 1Q84.”

„1984 and 1Q84 are fundamentally the same in terms of how they work. If you don’t
believe in the world, and if there is no love in it, then everything is phony. No matter which world we are talking about, no matter what kind of world we are talking about, the line separating fact from hypothesis is practically invisible to the eye. It can only be seen with the inner eye, the eye of the mind.”

Where there is light, there must be shadow, and where there is shadow there must be light. There is no shadow without light and no light without shadow

A prophet is simultaneously a king, and a king is destined to be killed. She was, in other words, an assassin sent by destiny. By violently exterminating a being who was both prophet and king, she had preserved the balance of good and evil in the world, as a result of which she must die. But when she performed the deed, she struck a bargain.

People grow up, and when they grow up they change.

For some reason, every detail he had put into writing had now become a reality. Cause and effect were jumbled together.

Any secret known by more than ten people isn’t a secret anymore.

A realization struck her. This is what it means to live on. When granted hope, a person uses it as fuel, as a guidepost to life. It is impossible to live without hope.

“If you do anything out of the ordinary, you can be sure someone, somewhere, will get upset,”

How ironic, Aomame thought. The pursuer’s blind spot is that he never thinks he’s being pursued.

We create the story, and at the same time the story is what sets us in motion.

From here on out, I’m the one in charge. I’m the one who decides what’s good and what’s bad—and which way we’re headed. And people had better remember that.

“You said you’re going far away,” Tamaru said.
“How far away are we talking about?”
“It’s a distance that can’t be measured.”
“Like the distance that separates one person’s heart from another’s.”

And the boy and the girl, hand in hand, made their way out of the forest.